Sunday, 31 July 2016

Big Finish Reviews+ Counter-Measures Series 2 by Tony J Fyler

Counter-Measures
Series 2

Tony Fyler
feels the need to breathe.

Series
1 of Counter-Measures established the tone it was going for like a punch in the
face – 60s ITC, which, to any non-Brits, means ‘in the vein of great adventure
serials like The Avengers, Department S, The Saint and the like’ – pacey,
stylish, more than a little upper-crust, and with the power to swoop in to save
the day if need be.

Series
1 essayed the fundamental spirit of Counter-Measures by pitching the team
against four classic villain-types of the day – Nazi scientists with alien
assistants, Russian scientists and brainwashing machines, megalomaniac
industrialists who ran their own tin-pot kingdoms, and aristocratic anarchists
threatening to overthrow the rule of law. All good meaty stuff, with plenty of
creepiness along the way.

The
planning meeting for Series 2 must have been a juggling session of ‘What have
we not done yet?’ – what archetypes of 60s sci-fi adventure drama hadn’t yet
been tackled by the team formed after the events of Remembrance of the Daleks?

Here
we’re in the territory of super soldiers, genetic manipulation, conspiracy,
nuclear power and more Russian mind manipulation. If anything the stories in
Series 2 feel more grounded, more down to Earth and less reliant on the alien
intervention that launched Counter-Measures on its journey.

There’s
a very distinct feeling of the team having grown up slightly here too, come
slightly further from the archetypes as which they started, for the most part
having been created for the family show that was 80s Doctor Who. There are no
sneaky back-references to the Coal Hill incident here – or if there are,
they’re minimal and thrown away – but the drama of real humans, real politics
and real emotional involvements at a number of levels is explored in
significant depth. That’s largely down to an increased focus on the member of
the core team who wasn’t part of the
Coal Hill hijinks – Sir Toby Kinsella, Counter-Measures’ man at the Ministry.
That shift of focus necessarily moves the team from ‘debonair clever folk
solving crimes’ territory into something inherently harder: good people doing a
tough job, under the command of someone who, much of the time, may not be
terribly likeable.

The
first story, Manhunt by Matt Fitton, opens up with a bang, with Group Captain
Gilmore, the team’s military backbone, on the run for a murder he may or may
not have committed. Sir Toby the arch manipulator appears to be heading up the
manhunt, while Gilmore’s replacement goes about ingratiating himself with the
team. There are real sexual politics at play in this story, very true to sixties
life, particularly in the way women fought – and sometimes compromised – their
way towards equality in the eyes of an establishment rarely inclined to take
them seriously. The big reveals, when they come, are perhaps not as massively
unexpected as Fitton might have wanted them to be, but they do at least deliver
the drama well and leave us with a few shocks to rock our system, and ensure we
listen closely going forward.

The
Fifth Citadel by James Goss takes us into creepy 60s nuclear fear territory,
with bunkers under London, tube workers with radiation sickness and an ultimate
sanction gambit for nuclear disarmament. Fifty years on, nothing about the
physics of radiation has radically changed, so The Fifth Citadel still sends a
shudder down the spine at its central ideas, but more than anything, Sir Toby is
essential in the foreground – while The Fifth Citadel has plenty for everyone
to do (Group Captain Gilmore gaining another nickname in the process, in case
‘Chunky’ ever grows tired) it’s Kinsella who’s the key to the whole thing,
through his association with another great scientist, Dr Elizabeth Bradley
(Celia Imrie continuing her conquest of the geek world with another great turn
following her appearance in The Bells of St John). Just as Toby was a key
player in Manhunt, delivering a solution that shocked, so he’s a prime mover
here, and he ends The Fifth Citadel with a hard-as-nails move that sends even
more shivers down the spine than the central threat of the episode does. For
all Sir Toby’s charm, these first two episodes introduce us to the man who is
the Government’s voice in the investigation of everything strange, setting up
an odd dynamic – it’s clearly a bad idea to tangle with Toby, but will the rest
of the team eventually have to, to save their souls before Kinsella pushes them
too far?

Episode
Three, Peshka by writing team Cavan Scott and Mark Wright, is more in the vein
of Series 1, with Russian aggression at its core. It’s also Counter-Measures
does Chess, with Russian and American grand masters playing in Amsterdam,
rumours of an intended defection, and even vaguer rumours of an intelligence
programme to create a kind of superhuman. While Kinsella again takes the lead
here, there’s more of a Series 1 split between the action, with Pamela Salem’s
Rachel Jensen and more particularly Karen Gledhill’s Alison Williams taking
centre stage as they befriend the Russian master and his sister, who has begged
them to allow him to defect. Nothing of course is as simple as it seems, and as
the peshka (pawns) are moved around, a grander gameplan is eventually revealed,
leading to the weirdest episode ending in Counter-Measures history so far. While
it’s true that Peshka is more in the vein of Series 1, it’s all about the
mindsets of political ideologies clashing, so it would be a mistake to imagine
it’s anything of a lighter experience than the other episodes of Series 2.

Finally,
Sins of the Fathers not only takes us furthest into Sir Toby’s mind and past
actions, but also acts as a kind of sequel to Manhunt, rounding off a series
that has been intense, moody, in-period but nothing like as much fun
as Series 1. More genetic manipulation, more super-soldiers, more ultimate
sanctions, and more underlining of the notion that Sir Toby is a cold-hearted
public servant, able to divorce himself from human connections to do what he
believes is necessary. You could argue he’s a psychopath, frankly – there are
plenty of them successfully making their way in society, after all – it just
makes it slightly harder to root for the Counter-Measures team if you think of
him that way.

The
choice to grow up the storytelling in Series 2 is clearly a conscious move to
develop Counter-Measures as a harder-edged, more real-human series, but in the
process, it goes from being the kind of adventure series ITF used to make to
something more akin to a long John Le Carre story, of spies, double-agents,
super-soldiers, governmental channels and the like. While Series 1 allowed
characters we thought we knew the time and space to grow and mature into fully
fleshed-out human beings, in particular Alison, who went through significant
trauma in the last episode of Series 1, the focus on Kinsella in Series 2 feels
like it rather robs the rest of the team of the same kind of opportunities.
It’s a generally gloomier, less engaging listen than Series 1, but it probably
does the job it was intended to do – anchoring Sir Toby as a real person in the
team, equalizing what we know of him with what we know of everyone else.

Here’s
hoping though that Series 3 feels able to up the action and leave a little of
the internal chicanery behind.